Why I Left My Dream Job and What I Did Next

Last year, I left my dream job.

After many months of – and I hate this phrase – soul-searching and considering every possible outcome, I handed in my resignation letter and quickly began wrapping up all of the exciting projects I’d been working on. The thing is: dream jobs don’t stay dream jobs. And I learned that, quite literally, on the job.

Just like personal goals, wishlist wants and what you want for dinner, the perception of your dream job can shift over time. Really, I started penning this post because I think it’s important to normalise the fact that it’s fine to change your mind after a little while. In many ways, that’s what happened to me: I’d checked off a super long-term goal and soon noticed my career goalposts moving around.

Why I decided to leave

At around the one-year mark at this job, I started to feel the unease. I’d started there as a freelancer for three months before HR approached me to discuss moving me to a permanent full-time contract. This happens fairly often in my experience – I freelanced for six years – and is typically because it is far more expensive for them to keep a contractor onboard. Since it was my dream job, I gladly accepted and took the nearly 40% pay cut (see what I mean?) in return for a plethora of ‘benefits’. The only catch? It was a fixed-term contract (FTC) that they promised to make permanent after three months.

I’m sure you can see where this is going but, long story short, HR did not in fact make my contract permanent. Not only did this mean I didn’t truly have job security, I also wasn’t eligible for almost any of the benefits originally offered. By this time, I’d worked at the company for six months. Since I was already feeling quite settled and LOVED what I was doing, I (stupidly) signed to renew my FTC contract for a further four months.

Fast forward to the one-year mark and I still hadn’t secured this elusive permanent contract. My HR contact continued to ply me with notes saying it was coming soon, my deadlines came in thick and heavy and, as the Cost of Living set in, I soon noticed my colleagues’ FTCs come to an end without renewal. With just one day until my FTC was due to finish, HR approached me to offer me… another FTC extension. With home-buying plans on the horizon, building unease, and all the inklings of a toxic workplace, I handed in my resignation with a months’ notice – two weeks’ more than I was legally required to.

How it felt

It’s taken me a long, long time to properly process leaving my dream job.

Believe me, if you were shocked to discover the fact on Instagram, then I was roughly a hundred times more shocked than you!

In the end, no amount of incredible sustainable innovations and pioneering greener solutions and fighting for climate change support and animal welfare outweighed the frankly awful way I was treated as an employee. I was unbelievably gutted to resign – I felt backed into it – and I felt incredible guilt at putting myself above all of these wonderful projects and initiatives that I have always wholly backed.

How I’m doing now

Even now, I’m still battling feelings of guilt that I seemingly didn’t care enough to stay. I wonder whether if this or that had changed, I’d still be there. Ultimately, I realised that what was once my dream job warped infinitely while I was in it. After plenty of introversion and reflection, I understood that what was once my dream job no longer was. Instead, I now dreamed of a role that offered stability, flexibility, creativity and far shorter hours than fashion.

My new role is an utter dream and, for the first time ever, I feel like I can see a future in this job. While I’ve left fashion and I’m no longer talking about luxury handbags, RTW, climate change and animal welfare, I do get to focus on community projects and feel like I’m making a small difference everyday, while enjoying a permanent position, flexible hours and creative workdays. It’s so true what they say: every day is a school day. And I’m grateful for every lesson learned in leaving my once-dream job.